Growing Substrate Composition Influences Growth, Productivity and Quality of Organic Vegetables

Organic food production, a dynamic and rapidly growing global activity is still new to Kuwait. Therefore, investigations were conducted during 2006-09 to develop package of cultivation practices for producing organic greenhouse vegetables under Kuwait's environmental conditions. One of the objectives of these investigations was to select a suitable growing substrate for organic greenhouse vegetable production. A number of combinations of vermicompost, cocopeat, sphagnum peatmoss, perlite, farm yard manure and Avicumus were compared with ready- to-use organic substrate for producing tomato, cucumber and capsicum under greenhouse conditions. Vegetative growth parameters (average plant height, number of leaves, chlorophyll index) and fruit yield per plant were used to evaluate various growing substrates. Overall, substrates containing vermicompost, coco peat, perlite and sphagnum peat moss (2:1:1:1 or 1:1:1:1 v/v) produced significantly better growth, yield and quality in tomato, cucumber and capsicum than other substrate combinations and in some cases were better than ready-to-use mixes and conventional soil based growing system. The results of these experiments are discussed in this presentation.